I’ve played it for a few hours, and so far it’s been amazing – great story, graphics and gameplay. I look forward to playing bits of it again once I’ve upgraded my ageing computer – when I tried it at 1920×1080 and “High” settings I got between 1 and 2 FPS! Playing at 1280×800 wasn’t much better, but was (mostly) playable

It’s no Half-Life (2) beater, but it comes pretty close. Of course, I might change my opinion once I play it through again on a better PC, but that’s unlikely, especially after how good HL2:Episode 2 was. However, it’s still one of the best games I’ve played in a long time, and I highly recommend it

I booted it up, went through all the Windows XP OOBE stuff and then the Acer software installation wizards, created the recovery DVD and then formatted it with an nLited XP Pro CD, which I created from an ISO provided by my University’s MSDN. It installed fine, but it took me a while to find the drivers for the hardware and then copy them over on my USB stick. After that I had to call up Microsoft as I had activated the XP code on a VMWare installation – I forget why :P Once Windows was done with all the software I like, and then put Fedora Core 6 on the 25GB free space I had left while formatting.

I copied over my Steam installation from my PC, and a couple of other games – I tried Half Life 2 at 1280×800 (Widescreen): I got over 60FPS on it… Considering this is a laptop, that’s amazing
GTI Racing was a similar story, once I’d stopped it trying to load at 1280×1024 – runs perfectly at 1024×768 (no widescreen support).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t work so well – not that I really expected it to. It runs *ok* at 800×600 and medium settings, but nothing more. I didn’t buy the laptop for gaming though – it’s for writing notes, coding on, and other stuff I need it for at University.

After doing all the above on it, it was quite late, and I went to bed, leaving it plugged in to get a really thorough first charge. However, when I woke up, and tried to turn the laptop on, it refused to even make so much as a beep or idle whirring noise!

The power LEDs under the “on” button and on the front panel flashes for a fraction of a second when I try and turn it on, but nothing else happens. So I’ve been in contact with Acer Support several times, and they asked me to send the charger back – they will then test it, and either send me a new one, or repair/replace the laptop, if it isn’t the charger that’s causing the problem.

However I borrowed a multi-laptop charger (one of those £100 iGo things with about 15 different “tips”) and tested my laptop on it, but it didn’t charge properly, nor would it turn on. So it would seem that it’s the laptop that’s broken. So I will send Acer back the laptop, not the charger… Hopefully they’ll fix or replace the broken part(s) quickly, and not send me a new laptop – I don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff, and spend 20 minutes on the phone with Microsoft again :P

Because of this problem, I haven’t been able to test stuff like the battery life, or even how good movies look on the screen (games look great though) – I will update this post when I have a working laptop again

I’ve made a lot of progress on L33TSig, and have learnt quite a few new things in Visual Basic, as well as in PHP. I also learnt a fair bit about raw HTTP, which is how the L33TSig client sends the data and checks to see if it’s the latest version.

It also seems to be that time again, where I spend yet more money on upgrades for my computer
I’m not sure exactly what else I’m getting, but I do know for sure, that I will be getting a new Viewsonic VX924, a 19inch TFT monitor with a 3 millisecond response time, 550:1 contrast ratio and a 160° viewing angle. Apart from that, I’m probably going to get two OCZ Premium LE 512MB PC3200 (CL 2-3-2-5) DDR sticks to run in dual channel (along with my current 1GB stick which is in single channel). I don’t know what else I’ll get, if anything. I’ll just have to see

Edit: Well after reading a few reviews about the Viewsonic VX924 I changed my mind, and bought the Viewsonic VX912. It’s actually a more expensive and better one than the VX924. I also changed my mind about the RAM too, and got a new Western Digital 160GB SATA2 (300Mb/sec) hard disk instead

- Fr3d

Here is one screenshot I took just for fun; I’ll take and post some more soon

Edit: As promised, here are two more screenshots

- Fr3d

My only complaint is that it is too short; therefore there isn’t enough time to enjoy the scenery (unless you spend a minute killing each Combine soldier)

Here is an in-game screenshot, one I’m actually using as my new wallpaper it’s such good quality!

- Fr3d